e? This is Noumea!... Let her pass for a fool--half-mad with
bitterness and chagrin though she be--and still you must admit it is not
every poor orphan who gets such a chance hereabouts. What? To occupy a
little manor outside the prison grounds. To enjoy the little benefits of
official standing. To wear the pretty trifles of jewelry, the rings and
keepsakes and lockets, that fall to the master's share every time he
strikes off a lucky head!... Dieu!... Can you picture to yourself the
home-coming at that menage after a day's honest labor? To be sure, she
might require him first to wash his hands for fear of spoiling her new
gown! But these stains of the trade--what do they matter? And so your
Zelie, your sweet pigeon, your simple Caledonienne who was all too
simple for you--whom you cast aside with 'brotherly advice'--she chooses
to embrace that ghoul, that hell-hound, that old satyr of all the
infamies.... To-morrow she weds with M. de Nou!"

In blind distress he stumbled to his feet and shied from her with hands
outspread to fend away the monstrous thing. But skillfully she headed
him around to the foot of the stairs and brought him face to face with
the actual vision descending there.

"Ask her yourself!"...

You have seen those figures in a window of old stained glass which leap
from the haze of color as if illumined of themselves. The girl who
waited just above us on the step bore that same transparent loveliness,
with all the fleshly promise of my glimpse of her in the market. She
wore a single belted garment of some white peasant's stuff, but nothing
could have suited better in the somber light of that place, smoke-blued
against smoky walls. In truth it might have seemed the subtlest coquetry
to clothe such beauty in the coarsest garb. For she herself was delicate
as a bud. Vital and lithe: with a close-set casque of jet hair, mouth
like a crushed mulberry against satin, mutinous eyes and chin: the wild,
slight, heavy-scented flower of these climes.

There she stood quite coolly: even languidly.

"Visitors?" she inquired, aware of us with impersonal gaze. "I wondered
if any would stop to-night. It would be kind of them to come and wish me
happiness."

Except that she spoke unsmiling and ignored Bibi-Ri, except for her
deathly pallor, she seemed without the least consciousness of a terrible
irony. And when my poor friend made some sound in his throat her pure
brow clouded a bit: she pouted.

"Have you been